Amarra - Page 5

"simple and painless"... that's always the rub.

By no means is Itunes inadequate. But for the super paranoid, XLD should ease all worries.

That exchange of posts was very enlightening as to other considerations an benefits...  Thx

I like Can-O'-Worms. 

I didn't say it loads the song once from disk before playback. I said it loads the song once from disk, i.e., not twice, not three times, not a time and a half. Once. That's the same number of times Amarra loads the song into memory, making about the same amount of electronic and mechanical noise in the process. Consequently, except for the very first preload, preloading doesn't provide any sound benefit, since it still has to load music during playback, even if it's subsequent songs being loaded. Using an external hard drive for your playback library largely eliminates the potential problems associated with the music player's disk accesses during playback, anyway. On the other hand, it doesn't do anything to help with disk accesses on the boot drive, but then again, neither does Amarra.

Right. Since Amarra uses the same DAC and amp as iTunes, there is no reason to believe music played through Amarra will have less jitter than the same music played through iTunes. Any effective steps taken to reduce jitter will benefit Amarra and iTunes equally. (Of course, there's no reason to believe that playback on a typical Mac will result in audible jitter.)
Edited by Jaywalk3r - 12/1/12 at 5:22pm

"Elvis has left the thread."

 

My point was that Amarra doesn't have to load music during playback, as it is already loaded beforehand. I don't know if our confusion here is what we are both referring to as "load" and "playback". Either way, what I'm talking about is data being read from disk while the music is actually playing.  Anyway, beyond that we'd need someone with expertise in producing pro-audio software to explain what is going on.

For the first preload, it is loaded before playback. Subsequent songs are loaded from the drive into memory during playback of songs that come before them in the playlist. The nature of gapless playback means that there is no opportunity to load files into RAM between songs. Suppose your playlist contains Song A, Song B, and Song C, and those songs are consecutive tracks from a gapless album. Amarra loads Song A into RAM prior to playing song A. During Song A's playback, Amarra loads Song B into RAM, so that it doesn't load it during its playback. While Song B is loading, Amarra loads Song C, etc. Note that it doesn't matter how many songs Amarra loads at a single time. At some point, it has to load more music while some song is still playing. Consequently, preloading provides benefit only the first time it occurs and even then the real world benefit is questionable, at best.
Edited by Jaywalk3r - 12/1/12 at 5:45pm

I'm liking XLD for CD import. The Amazon API for cover art is cool.

XLD is significantly faster than Amarra for converting FLAC to ALAC

ALAC sounds fine.... Like I could tell the difference to AIFF.  

Plus it looks to be about 15% smaller.

Plus+  Amara HiFi does not have a progress bar when importing.  Thats annoying...

Regular Amarra does but it's hidden and you need to call it up .  I give the nod to XLD.

 

However, and I can't put my finger on it,  my ears likes Amarra a smidge more than native iTunes.  Don't say it !  Perceived.  Tiny difference.

 

Lastly,  I went and upgraded Amarra to 2.5 (4435)  ....  It crashes every time I want to convert FLAC.

Every time.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions.

ALAC and AIFF are both lossless formats, so they contain exactly the same amount of information about the song (any metadata differences, which have no effect on SQ, notwithstanding) should sound identical to each other and to WAV files.

I'm not surprised. When I compared iTunes to Amarra I perceived a difference as well. iTunes sounded cleaner. The same music played through Amarra (in default configuration) sounded as though it was running through a digital signal processor like SRS. The effect was minimal, but listening to some solo acoustic Chet Atkins, the delay/reverb/something similar effect, while minimal, was still pretty noticeable. As I prefer a clean, unadulterated sound (personal preference only), I found iTunes' playback to be superior. That Amarra's UI was nothing short of atrocious at that point, the decision to uninstall Amarra was quite easy.

AIFF isn't lossless, it is just uncompressed. But yeah lossless files sound the exact same as uncompressed; I don't get what makes people think otherwise.

Edited by chewy4 - 12/2/12 at 11:01am

You're right. Both contain every bit of data that was there originally. But lossless takes up less space. 

Edited by paradoxper - 12/2/12 at 11:05am

I think you hit it.  iTunes sounded a bit too clinical for me.  In other words, clean.  The way you like it.

I tend towards warmth,   I'll look for a few tracks with the effects you mentioned and give it another listen.

It's both. A file format need not be compressed to be lossless.

Well, lossless is an audio format that uses an algorithm to compress audio data...without loss, etc.

 

Chewy seems to be playing semantics.